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| NYS Prison Budget Climbs, Despite Fewer Inmates |
| By citylimits.org- Ken Stier |
| Published: 11/10/2015 |
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New York State has slashed its inmate population by more than a quarter since its peak in 1999, from 71,538 to roughly 53,000 today, but the state's corrections department budget has swollen by nearly a one-third in that time to close to $3 billion. This seems unlikely to change much either–in fact the budget went up last year, as did the number of unionized guards –and these trends could very well continue. So much for the virtuous "justice reinvestment" cycle of taking money saved from expensive incarceration ($60,000 per inmate per year in New York State) and redirecting those public funds into communities to help former inmates reintegrate and keep youthful offenders out of ‘doing time.' That's not happening now. What small savings there have been occurred mostly on paper, costs avoided but spent elsewhere in the bureaucracy. That's discouraging because the state's recent inmate reduction was the "easy" part of moving away from the heyday of excessive incarceration. It was largely accomplished by rolling back the draconian 1973 Rockefeller drug law, a move that the federal government is now largely replicating by releasing non-violent drug offenders, eventually tens of thousands of them. In New York, the reforms ultimately led to the closure of 13 prisons, where should have translated into real savings. Future reductions will be harder to come by, take more time and yield fewer if any savings. Read More. |
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